Morbidly Beautiful Insect Photos Challenge the Bug-Human Barrier

When Catherine Chalmers looks at leaf cutter ants, she sees Facebook; when she sees cockroaches, she sees suburban families. Her science-inspired art can be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and she hopes it makes viewers question how we think of other animals.

“I’m interested in investigating how we relate to nature from a cultural perspective,” says Chalmers, who lives in New York City. “I feel that somewhere through the march of time we’ve placed certain animals and insects in nature on another level. They’ve been walled off.”

For her most recent project, Chalmers traveled to the rain forests in Panama and Costa Rica to examine leaf cutter ants. As part of her art, she purposely placed a piece of vegetation in their pathway to see if they would start to cut it apart, and when she observed warring ants in Costa Rica she placed a small white backdrop underneath them and created a mini studio to document the action.

Chalmers does not have any formal training in science (she does have an engineering degree from Stanford), but says she’s learned a lot over the course of her work as an artist. Because much of her photography takes place in her studio she’s had to figure out how to raise and care for the insects and animals. And several of her ideas, she says, come from reading work by scientists such as E.O. Wilson who thought about the larger implications of how humans relate to, and are related to, the living world around them.

“Reading scientists who discuss the larger theoretical picture has given has definitely given me a lot of inspiration and has helped fuel my ideas,” she says.

One of her primary interests in the leaf cutter ants in particular is the way they mirror human society. “If you didn’t put a name to the description of how they operate you might think someone was talking about humans,” she says. “Like us they are agriculturalists, they raise other animals and they take slaves.”

She says ants are one of the most efficient and dominant insects because they are constantly exchanging little pieces of information with each other about the location of food sources, oncoming threats, etc. They are networked in a way that social networks now allow us to be. While we may only communicate in mundane updates on Facebook or Twitter, the process itself helps us build a more ant-like network. For this reason, Chalmers sees humans starting to move more as a cohesive unit than just a collection of discrete points.

“At some point during our history there was the rise of the individual, but today we’re beginning to reconnect,” she says. “For me the ants have shown me what social networking is all about and how powerful it can be.”

Dr. Audrey Dussutour, a faculty member at the Université Toulouse III in France, specializes in ant communication and behavior and agrees that social networking, in certain ways, mimics the way ants communicate and organize themselves. Not all ants in a colony are in contact with each other all the time because there can be millions of them. But within their particular groups, or circles, their networks and channels of communication are incredibly strong.

“You have small groups that are super connected and then there are few links between these groups and the other groups” in the colony, she says. “You could say it’s like Facebook.” However, unlike humans, who still rely on a hierarchical structure in our society, ants are much more egalitarian. “The very big difference is that they don’t have a leader, it’s self organized,” she says. “The intelligence comes from the group and not the individual.”

Watching how ants organization themselves, Dussutour says, we’ve been able borrow some of their communal structures. In the world of leaf cutter ants for example, there is never a traffic jam because between all of them they’ve worked out a better way to regulate their movement.

“They use very simple rules. For example, if you are carrying a leaf, I give you the right of way,” she says. This way of regulation flows has already helped us create algorithms that we use to direct internet traffic and researchers are studying how it might also be applied to car traffic.

Another of Chalmers’ projects, entitled Food Chain, also makes use of her stark, white-background style to show the gruesomely gorgeous sequence of predators eating their prey and then being eaten by their predators. A tomato worm eats a tomato, then is eaten by a praying mantis, which is then eaten by a frog.

The series is meant to force the viewer to take a deeper look at our cultural habits.

“We are the top predator yet we are totally at odds with and completely queasy about killing something,” she says. “We think it’s funny when a dog bats around a squeaky toy but often don’t realize that it’s actually a predatory instinct.”

For Chalmers, the seemingly arbitrary distinction we make between a fluffy dog being cute and a spindly insect being gross holds fascinating insight into our culture and biology.

Paul Rozin, a professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies disgust, says that culture is indeed a major determinate in how we relate to insects and animals. He takes it one step further, however, and says that if we really want to think about why our relationships to animals and insects have developed a certain way then we should see them through the lens of food, making Chalmers’ Food Chain examination all the more appropriate.

“Insects are potentially a great source of food but they gross us out,” he says. “If you think about it, we’re grossed out by almost everything. We have a very narrow and very sensitive view about what an ‘edible’ animal is.”

In fact, he says, most humans refuse to eat the vast majority of the animal world. “The question really is, ‘Why do we make exceptions about certain kinds of animals?'” he says.

Chalmers’ obsession with those exceptions logically led her to one of the world’s most despised insects, the cockroach.

“Cockroaches are such a loaded subject and I wanted to think about why we hate them so much,” she says. “They certainly terrified me.”

Her series Residents shows roaches in a dollhouse eating in the kitchen, having sex in the bedroom and raising their babies in the nursery. It’s a play on the real world, she says, and is meant to show how even though we are obsessed with getting rid of cockroaches, our dwellings have actually created the perfect environment for them to thrive.

“Our natural habitat has become their natural habitat,” she says.

In another series of photos Chalmers shows cockroaches that have been painted and photographed in picturesque outdoor settings. By playing with their aesthetic, Chalmers says she wanted to explore how we might re-see cockroaches if they conformed to our idealized standards of “beauty” and “nature.”

The final part of the photo series shows the insects being killed in very human-like ways — they’re hung in nooses, burned at the stake and electrocuted. (She says no cockroaches were actually harmed in the process of making the photos.) This section is mean to center in on our obsession with eradication.

“Most of our scientific energy around cockroaches is spent devising a better way to kill them,” she says.

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Catherine Chalmers will be exhibiting her work with leafcutter ants at Gallery DeNovo in Sun Valley, Idaho, from Aug. 3 to Sept. 15. The show, titled “We Rule,” features two videos, eight photographs and six drawings.

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